


sine to the devils Booke

by guardingdark, mylordshesacactus



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005), Historical RPF
Genre: Alien Culture, Cultural Differences, Episode: s07e05 The Angels Take Manhattan, Historical References, Other, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-20
Updated: 2013-08-20
Packaged: 2017-12-24 02:31:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/934159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/guardingdark/pseuds/guardingdark, https://archiveofourown.org/users/mylordshesacactus/pseuds/mylordshesacactus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A furious sweep of a wing cracked a mirror in two, the light finally perished in the face of her anger, and her children cried as they starved.</p>
            </blockquote>





	sine to the devils Booke

**Author's Note:**

> Headcanons used in the Weeping Angel portions of this fic can be found [here](http://sarahjane.co.vu/post/54393138969).

The trapdoor dropped open, the rope snapped tight, and flames leaped up around him but he didn’t burn.

* * *

The cherubim were crying.  
  
If it were possible, she might be crying too.  
  
It had been stupid— _stupid_ , unforgivably stupid. She knew better, she should never have been hunting near the Quay. But the cherubim were hungry, her mate hadn’t eaten in days, she hadn’t eaten in longer; the temporal energy swirling along the streets had been sweet in her mouth and she could no longer resist it.  
  
 _Just a touch,_ she thought desperately, scratching with too-soft fingernails against the cellar wall. _A touch and we would have been strong again_. If they were only smaller, still, too young to take a form, suckling quantum sustenance from her very soul again... she would give them all the energy of Time that she contained, if it would keep them alive.  
  
Her frantic clawing stuttered painfully, crackling in and out as her muscles flashed to stone and back in the sparking light of a dying bulb.  
  
Time flowed on, and she felt each moment pass through her like water through a sieve; energy that would keep her alive, keep her cherubim alive, if only she could _capture_ it, but it existed without possibility, a moment containing only the energy of a moment already dead, with no nourishment to be drawn from it...  
  
A furious sweep of a wing cracked a mirror in two, the light finally perished in the face of her anger, and her children cried as they starved.

* * *

He demanded a lawyer even as they struggled to keep the noose around his neck; _facing death with dignity_ was a romantic notion for romantic fools. They couldn’t _do_ this to him.  
  
The gallows— _gallows_ , what kind of insane asylum was this place?—were across from a graveyard. Undoubtedly this was meant to have some deep existential meaning. Grayle found it, like most things specifically intended to have deep existential meaning, nothing short of pretentious. It was 1938. Nobody really believed in those things anymore.  
  
Finally he heard someone call for a whip of some sort to subdue him. Julius Grayle was not a man who tolerated threats, but then again his hands were quite literally tied (With rough, barbaric rope no less) so he stopped fighting the long-haired hooligans manhandling him up the rickety wooden structure.  
  
 _The police are bound to turn up soon,_ he thought incredulously. He cast his eyes over the scene, and his blood chilled.  
  
The creature had absolutely not been there a moment ago. But there it was, posed piously between headstones like a sculpture.  
  
He blinked. It smiled up at him.

* * *

He’d taken her away from her children. They were still down there, starving. They couldn’t survive without the energy she gave them. She could waste away if need be; as soon as some temporal energy came upon her she would be fine again. But they were too young. If they didn’t have it they would _die_ and she would live forever _knowing they died because she wasn’t there._  
  
She pulled against the chains and she screamed, but she had no voice here among the living and no-one heard her.  
  
Her children were going to die. Because of her.

* * *

It had all happened extremely fast. To be honest, after the weeks rotting in that hellhole of a jail surrounded by women with absolutely no understanding of the fact that the whole lot of them ought to be protected by United States law he was barely able to register the sudden rush of stimuli. What he _did_ know was that it had been swelteringly hot and there had been a great many shouting people dressed like they’d just stepped off the Mayflower, staring at him judgmentally while he attempted to explain the nature of the terrible mistake that had been made.  
  
“I was sent here by the angels!” he yelled furiously. “They assaulted me and removed me from my home to this place!”  
  
“And your home is that of the Deceiver, is it not?” one of the many long-haired men had demanded.  
  
“Look, I didn’t vote for the man!” Some of Roosevelt’s opposers were downright insane; most of the old-money upper class refused to even speak his name, though _The Deceiver_ was a new one. “I said resources would be better used helping job creators instead of being wasted on the poor—”  
  
He hadn’t really gotten anything out past that; someone had banged a gavel and he’d been dragged away through a crowd of shrieking Pilgrims, cursing the Angels and still demanding a lawyer.

* * *

She hated curtains.  
  
It was a minor concern, yes. She had no host to rescue her; her mate, if she could even hear her silent screaming, was only bene elohim and would only put herself and their sons in danger if she came. Her captor, the white-fleshy-one whose little remaining temporal energy was stained and bitter, had been careful, knew his business well enough to strike a chord of genuine terror in her ancient heart; how did he know, how could he _possibly_ have known how to starve one of her order?  
  
Her cherubim at least had fed, she knew that much; she had gone dizzy with relief as well as hunger when she first felt that vibrant rush of life from the cellar, heard the cries of joy from her poor starving children that deaf, foolish mortals would never hear. They were being fed, they would survive, they were safe down there in the merciful dark.  
  
But weeks and endless weeks had dragged on before, with nothing to feed on but the crumbs of life that were the ants in the corners and, once, a mouse that had crawled foolishly out of the wall, shared between her three precious ones. It had served as a brief supplement to the dregs of energy she forced out of her own body, starving herself all the faster for it until she had finally lost the power for her killing touch, lost even the strength to crack so much as wood let alone bone.  
  
And yet she found time to despise the rustling velvet that protected her from the world as much as it annoyed her. She could at least move; the metal would chafe on softened skin, the flesh-and-blood muscles of her once powerful wings would cramp and ache and beg to be stretched to their full extent, to be _free_ once more, to wrap around a mate and a family and hold them close as the planets spun toward their demise; and always there was the ever-present, gnawing hunger for that purest of energies. But the dusty curtain that pressed against her let her move, gave her time to recognise approaching footsteps, to lunge in the hope of, finally, catching her captor off-guard.  
  
She was blind and bored and starving, and she hated the curtain for who it served.  
  
And the dust made her nose itch.

* * *

“I _demand_ to be let out of here!” Grayle roared for the thousandth time. “I am a tax-paying citizen of the United States of America, I cannot be treated this way!”  
  
A girl in ragged clothes laughed. “Citizen of what now?” she asked, elbowing the young woman beside her with a tired grin. “Where’d they find _him_ , y’reckon?”  
  
Another woman hushed them harshly. “ _Elizabeth_ ,” she hissed. “Don’t talk to him. Man’s not right in the head.”  
  
“I know _exactly_ what I am talking about, madam!” Grayle said with inordinate dignity. “I have the right to a lawyer and I simply cannot be kept here without a charge! It’s completely unconstitutional!”  
  
“You’ll have a charge, alright,” muttered Elizabeth.  
  
“Completely _what_?” said another woman.  
  
“Not right in the head, what did I say?”  
  
“ _I am perfectly sane, girl!_ ” he exclaimed.  
  
“Shut him up!” came a furious hiss from a distant corner. “Goody Osbourne’s not well.”

* * *

Someone was there.  
  
It was not, she thought, her captor. The large-white-fleshy-one had heavier steps, moved more slowly; these footfalls were smaller and quicker, crossing back and forth across the room on the other side of the curtain.  
  
Someone was there, she did not know who, and they were coming closer.  
  
It had been an eternity, countless eons since she had last known fear. Fear was for prey; for the soft, pitifully-short flashes that carried their energy so close to the surface, so easily severed from a body that could tear like rice paper. It was natural for them to fear. But for her kind, ancient, untouchable, _eternal_...  
  
She lacked now even the strength to break her bonds; the laughably tenuous strands of life holding quantum energy to the bodies of her prey had become impossible to sever even if she could have caught them. The only thing keeping her alive now was the ambient energy of thousands of people living—a piteous amount, hardly enough to keep her alive and far from enough for growing children. She prayed to the Hayot they would not be left in the cellar, forgotten.  
  
She _was_ fear. She had never known it. But her prey had never been _stronger_ than her before.  
  
No. She growled to herself. _She was not helpless._ These short flashes of life would learn what it meant to chain Fear herself, to challenge forces they could not understand; they would know her true face, they would comprehend it, before their energies withered and blew to ash. She would taste their terror before they died, and it would be sweet on her tongue.  
  
The commotion had drawn the attention of whichever short-life had been clattering about the room, and nervous footsteps began making their approach.  
  
 _Good_ , she thought in a rush of hunger. _Come then, fool, and let me feed._  
  
The chains clinked dully as she yanked them to their full extent. The links didn’t even strain. She snarled, pulling at them harder, and she could feel the sharp edges of the shackles cutting into her flesh, and she didn’t care. What was pain in the face of freedom, of revenge? She knocked her wings helplessly against the once-frail walls of the curtained alcove, hissed in fury and—  
  
Froze.  
  
All the ancient wisdom of the universe, she despaired, all the power of Time itself contained in her very being, and mere prey could still freeze her with a glance.  
  
The short female fleshy-one who had foolishly pulled her curtain aside took one look at the carved marble face--at the twisted grimace of pure hatred in which it had frozen--gave a bloodcurdling shriek, and yanked the curtain back into place. Its footsteps flew out of the room, down the steps and out the back door.  
  
 _Good_ , she thought petulantly.

* * *

”Young man?” called Widow Miller. “Are you sleeping, young man?”  
  
If he had been, he certainly would have been woken by her asking.  
  
“No,” he said shortly.  
  
The old woman quailed slightly, and he sighed. He was, perhaps, being a bit ungracious. He would have to be sure to make some sort of donation to this backwoods settlement, once he was back in New York.  
  
“Oh, of course not,” she said with a nervous attempt at cheerfulness. “All in your Sunday best and such. The preacher’s come to visit is all, and he’d like to speak with you if you have the time.”  
  
Oh, thank god, someone he could _reason_ with.  
  
“Of course,” he said with as much confidence as he could muster, taking a moment to straighten his sleeves and brush some of the dirt from his jacket. “I have a few things to discuss with your preacher, in fact.”  
  
The serious-faced young man beside her reached out and took Grayle’s hand solemnly. “Samuel Parris,” he said by way of introduction.  
  
“Julius Grayle,” replied Julius Grayle. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Reverend.” The man didn’t look like any priest he had ever seen; there were young women in New York with hair shorter than his, and who would have envied the fine spray of lace at his throat. But if the people of this town respected him, so be it.  
  
The Reverend inclined his head. “And you, Mr. Grayle. The good Widow tells me you have a lot of questions. I wonder if perhaps I might help you find the answers.”  
  
Grayle gave a sigh of relief. “ _Thank_ you,” he said, and the heartfelt emotion was almost something approaching genuine. “It’s been the very devil of a time trying to get anything out of anyone else in this town. I appreciate the chance to contact someone more... influential in the community. Meaning no disrespect to the good Widow, of course,” he added with humility he did not feel.  
  
“I see,” said the Reverend carefully, studying Grayle. “Jeanette told me you were trying to speak to someone with some sort of... device?”  
  
Grayle briefly considered the idea of explaining the concept of a telephone, then decided it was probably a bit too ambitious for people who had yet to realise that engines existed. He was obviously in an extremely rural area. “I’d really just like to get to a city,” he said. “Where are we, exactly?”  
  
“Massachusetts,” Widow Miller offered helpfully.  
  
“May I ask why you’re so determined to get to a city?”  
  
“I have certain... colleagues of mine,” he said carefully, not wanting to admit to a man of the Lord their illegal connections, “whom I can reach in a city. I’ve been rather suddenly displaced from my home.” Massachusetts wasn’t too far at all; they were obviously a rural Mennonite community, or something similar.  
  
“Misplaced?” said the Reverend, eyeing Grayle with suspicion.  
  
“It’s a long story, I fear.”  “I have time,” said the Reverend obligingly. “Tonight’s sermon is being performed by Reverend Noyes.”  
  
Grayle fished a cigar and his lighter out of his coat pocket. “Do you want a light?” he asked, offering up the open flame to the young Reverend.  
  
Widow Miller screamed.

* * *

The next time the curtains were pulled away, hours or even days later (and wasn’t it pathetic that she couldn’t tell?), there was a small collection of objects on the desk, which she stared at as a thin sheet was laid down at her feet.  
  
“Wouldn’t want to make the job harder for the maid,” said the large one.  
  
His associates laughed.  
  
She was forced to watch helplessly as the large one lifted a carborundum block from the desk, and she couldn’t turn her gaze away from the empty space.  
  
She was worried, she’d admit. They were stronger than she had thought, and perhaps smarter, too. They might have found some way to hurt her kind. They might find a way to hurt them _and use it on her children_. She braced herself, staring at the desk, at the tools which sat there—if they hurt her, she would show no pain. She couldn’t, for the sake of the cherubim.  
  
The large one held the chunk of carborundum to her face threateningly. It was small and not particularly threatening.  
  
“It’s just stone,” he was muttering under his breath. “Just stone. Stone’s not indestructible.”  
  
She wasn’t sure whether or not he was wrong. She waited just as anxiously as the others as the large one scrubbed the carborundum brick along her frozen jaw.  
  
The brick rasped and grated; and as seconds ticked by it became apparent that it was the brick that was being filed away.  
  
She wasn’t so helpless after all then, yet. The large one was blocking her from the view of one of his associates; he glanced away, over at the desk full of tools, and just as he did so, the second man blinked.  
  
The fleshy one jumped as her fingers were yanked to a halt a hair’s breadth from his elbow; and when he saw the smile that he had frozen across her face, he leapt away.  
  
 _Come then_ , she challenged the world. She was not so weak that she would fear her own prey.  
  
She did not fear them after that, after the first confirmation that while her strength may have left her she had some grain of power that never would. It was not fear she felt as the fleshy one and his cohorts took turns with a sledgehammer, striking clumsily at her hands and arms and wings; it was violent triumph as the blows rebounded, as she failed to even feel their strikes, as eventually the sledgehammer itself shattered against her hip. It was not fear she felt as they blunted their drills and ground their saws to uselessness against her skin.  
  
She did not feel fear. Fear was for prey to know, as their tools failed them and they grew pale and sweaty, and swung useless hammers in a futile attempt to deny their weakness.  
  
Eventually the large one sent his associates away, calling up an assistant and whispering in his ear. The two associates couldn’t have heard him, but _she_ did, and inwardly she laughed in joy. Her children would be well-fed.  
  
He stood in front of her, breathing heavily. She smiled calmly back at him.  
  
She gave a silent, elated laugh when he picked up a chisel and hammer from where they had fallen. Let him try! Let him batter himself to pieces against her skin! Let him know, at last, the depth of his foolishness, the futility of his pathetic attempts to make himself an equal to her kind!  
  
He held her eyes, his gaze cold even as his hands shook—and oh, to be a Seraph, if only she were strong again, if only she could push his tiny, brief spark of a mind to the side and replace it with a seed of her own, could have some small revenge!  
  
Her captor fussed briefly with his chisel, resting it against her collarbone, the joint of her wing, before settling it carefully over her eye. He lined the hammer up and took a practice swing—once, twice, three times, pulling back for the final swing, and she laughed again inside as the hammer descended; had he learned nothing? It was almost growing tiresome.  
  
As the hammer whistled in, the weak-fleshy-prey-thing squeezed his eyes shut. Instantly the quantum lock broke, Time flowed through her like sunlight through glass, and unfeeling stone became warm flesh that ripped and gushed and poured with red.  
  
This time he heard her when she screamed.

* * *

Now that the old woman was at church, Grayle could have a proper look about the place. The living conditions here were _horrific_. The lack of a telephone was swiftly becoming less and less of a concern; they didn’t even have _electricity_ , the walls were thin—barely more than a shack, really—and, oh yes, the floor was made of _dirt_.  
  
He would just have to get the woman to tell him exactly where he was when she got back. It was obvious now what had happened; the creature was afraid of him, and had tried to protect itself by sending him as far away as it could. He was obviously in one of those backwards countries that tree-huggers went to to study monkeys and write poems about dirt, and no doubt the statue-things thought they had gotten rid of him. They just hadn’t counted on modern ingenuity and the depths of Julius Grayle’s influence and tenacity. As soon as he knew where he was, he would have a plan. Then he could bully his way to the nearest civilized place and make his way back to New York.  
  
Those angels were going to _pay_ for all this trouble.

* * *

 The cherubim had stopped crying.  
  
She was growing weaker. The long period of starvation that had been gradually stripping her of her powers was over; there was nothing more for her to lose, no more temporal energy to leech from her body. The last dregs of it had been torn from her, dragged sluggishly from reserves she had thought long since depleted, to staunch the wound over her eye, to accelerate the healing that could only come with Time, that in lesser beings... in... _other_ beings... would have taken days if not weeks. Now it was only physical strength she could, ever so slowly, lose.  
  
The curtain was left open more frequently now; her captor was growing bold, losing his fear of her now that he believed her less of a threat. Now that she could no longer protect herself, no longer harm him.  
  
Her children were alone. They were being fed—but they were being fed like animals in a zoo, growing feral and violent towards one another, lazy and bored and stupid with it. They no longer cried for their mother. They could sense her, and she them; that, at least, no mortal flesh-thing could take from her. But they were losing their cleverness, their devotion to their host, their bold swiftness. They were meant to be hunters, but this creature was making them his pets.  
  
They were her _children_ , she thought in quiet despair. She was so close, and she was losing them.  
  
Her captor was scribbling symbols on a piece of paper when a door opened somewhere in the house. He look up sharply, glanced at her—a flash of stone, that disorientating stiffness, and then it passed as he looked away—and rushed out the door.  
  
Once more, she tried to spread her aching wings, bumping them listlessly against the walls of her alcove. She had all but given up ever knowing what it felt like to stretch her wings again.  
  
She froze.  
  
The man had left the curtains open at the window; an oversight he would normally have avoided at all costs. Someone was watching her from the street. Another human, marvelling at the tortured statue within, perhaps—  
  
They blinked, or looked away, and she turned her head to hiss at them—let them startle and jump at the twisted grimace that only a moment before had been an exhausted prisoner. Let herself taste, at least once more, that tiny thrill of satisfaction that rode on the fear of prey.  
  
She turned, and froze once more in the rictus of utter bloodlust.  
  
Staring out at an empty street. _But that was impossible._ She could feel eyes on her from just across the street, watching, holding her in an impenetrable shell; but there was nothing there, only the rain and the wind and a statue. A statue of a modestly pretty young woman with a gentle smile and eyes that, while empty in the manner of statues, somehow held all the love in the universe; a statue that projected a warmth and calm that washed over her starving mind like a timeline snapping into place, stable and steady and welcoming as a loop that wove itself, a patch of the universe fresh and fair and that even the Time Lords had never gotten the opportunity to touch, ripe and bursting with temporal energy that was unsullied and pure...  
  
In a city full of Seraphs and hosts of elohim, of others of her kind more powerful, more deadly, who had heard her screams and cries for help and ignored her, who had abandoned her and her children to die, her mate had found her at last.  
  
They stared across the street, basking in the song that was their shared temporal path across the universe, embracing the renewed touch of their minds against each other’s. The dying lamp flecked the raindrops with liquid gold, and some part of her knew it was the quantum lock, but the greater part knew that even if she had been able to move, she could never have looked away.  
  
With an abrupt bang, the door to the office flew open and her white-fleshy-captor hurried in. He rushed across to the windows and yanked the curtains closed, then crossed back to his prisoner and dragged the velvet partition over her face.  
  
But she could still hear her mate’s mind, and for the first time since her capture, a true hunter’s smile spread across her face.

* * *

“Reverend,” said Widow Miller insistently. “Reverend? Reverend, may I have a word?”  
  
He turned to her with that serious, intent look he always had after one of his sermons. “Jeanette,” he said kindly. “Of course, of course. What do you have on your mind?”  
  
“Well,” said Widow Miller carefully, “there was this young man this morning, and he looked lost and hungry, so I invited him in, of course...”  
  
“Of course,” agreed the preacher.  
  
“He seems... disturbed,” she said delicately.  
  
Reverend Parris’ gaze sharpened. “Disturbed how?” he asked, drawing her aside.  
  
“Well, I wouldn’t want to spread any misinformed rumours,” Widow Miller said quickly. “He seems very confused, but he _has_ been saying the _strangest_ of things. He talks all the time about a monster and about how he can’t understand why we won’t help him talk to someone...”  
  
“Talk to who?”  
  
“I haven’t the slightest idea!” she exclaimed. “He won’t tell me, he just says something about a man he hates who appeared in a burst of light, and he _does_ go on about how pathetic our lives are here. And I invited him to your wonderful sermon this afternoon but he absolutely refused to come!”  
  
The reverend looked very serious.  
  
“Thank you for telling me,” he said. “I’ll consider this very carefully.”

* * *

The sound of Time itself changing its shape to accommodate the arrival of the Great Houses (or rather, what remained of them, the solitary couple and their human pets, fallen so far from their once-brilliance) was not a sound so much as it was a rending in the fabric of reality, a sensation that was _so much more_ than the creaking, wheezing sound and the wind it brought up into those simple three dimensions of human existence.  
  
The materialisation stirred up Rift energy and the lives of countless mortals who were as much displaced from their times by the Gallifreyans as any victim of an Angel—lives meant to be lived but broken off so immaturely, the broken threads of their worldlines left untied and dripping energy. The raw temporal energy flooded into her with all the force and energy of an exploding star—so much more than the dregs of Time caged in the blood of the time-traveller whose wrist was clenched in her grip. She had to force herself not to drink up as much as she could; she was starving, but she had been starving for _so long_ , and if she let herself drink uninhibited it would only hurt her later on.  
  
She resigned herself to the ghost of power in the human time-traveller’s blood even as artron energy crackled across the stone of her skin, burning and making her more alive than she’d been in months—still not enough to displace the woman without touching bare flesh, and she grasped at every mind she could reach and _screamed_.

* * *

There was an old woman sitting in a rocking chair and knitting. She looked normal enough.  
  
“Excuse me,” he said, as politely as possible. He still wasn’t convinced that this place wasn’t some sort of death trap. “May I borrow your telephone?”  
  
“My what?” asked the woman, and Grayle’s heart sunk.  
  
“Your telephone,” he repeated. “You know, an electrical contraption that you speak into and which sends your voice along a telephone line?” And God, he felt a right idiot explaining what a telephone was, but they might have a different word for it, wherever he was. It certainly wasn’t America; the accents weren’t right. Britain must have _telephones_?  
  
The old woman had been nodding along slowly as he spoke. “So what is it you were wanting, again, young man?”  
  
The last person to call him ‘young man’ had been his grandmother. “Your _telephone_.” He mimed holding up the mouthpiece.  
  
The woman frowned slightly, sitting forward and seeming genuinely concerned for the first time. “Young man,” she said seriously. “Do you need help?”  
  
“Yes,” Grayle said emphatically. “I don’t know where I am, I’ve not got any clothes save for these, I _slept outside last night_ , and I’ve got no way to contact my secretary.”  
  
She set her knitting aside in a businesslike manner. “Are you hungry?” she asked.  
  
“Starved,” said Grayle, and then, sensing that this was a bit forward, added, “But I’d hate to impose...”

* * *

The Time Lord—the _true_ Time Lord, not the abomination of vortex-manipulated humanity—didn’t so much as look at her, checking the white-fleshy-one’s pulse and smiling up at the woman, while all the while she screamed in his mind, pleading for her children. She could feel the walls of it, more formed than any she’d ever come across, even among her own people. She _knew_ he could hear her.  
  
When he finally acknowledged her at all, it was a quick glance with cold eyes and a flippant dismissal he didn’t so much as bother to put into words. He closed his mind to her, doors locking and melting into plain, static walls, leaving her consciousness pressing uselessly, slipping off without gaining any purchase.  
  
Here she was, begging a Time Lord, begging _the Doctor_ , whose tales told of _second chances_ and _surrender_ and _I don’t want to hurt you_. She was metaphorically prostrating herself to the enemy for the sake of her family, and he didn’t want to hear it. She screamed louder in rage, throwing vitriol at his mind. She would have let his pet abomination go unharmed, before. Now she refused to concede.  
  
They were flirting. Her children were locked in a cellar and he _knew_ that, and he was _flirting_ with his little mortal pet, completely unconcerned with her plight. He waved a buzzing instrument at her hand for a moment, the bright green light casting eerie shadows. “She’s holding you very tight,” he said, and there was the concern she had hoped for, and the worry.  
  
“At least she didn’t send me back in time.”  
  
“I doubt she’s strong enough,” he said distractedly, looking at the scars on her face with a scientific detachment.  
  
“Well I need a hand back,” said the woman arrogantly. “So which is it going to be? Are you going to break my wrist or hers?”  
  
What was a bit more pain? She could handle it. But something changed in the Doctor’s face, and her heart soared in hope as the woman frowned.  
  
“Oh, no. Really? Why do you have to break _mine_?”  
  
She laughed, shocked, although no one could hear her; _Because he thinks nothing of you_ , she projected to the woman. The Doctor’s message in blocking her out could not have been clearer. He was making this a contest, a battle of wills between two ancient enemies, two creatures of Time, eternal, immortal, with oceans of blood in their wake. _Lower himself to speak with me? Never._ Not for something so inconsequential as saving his pet a broken wrist. Her surrender had been rejected; in doing so he had already given up the chance to save the other human. It was more important to hold her children hostage than it was to rescue his so-called companion.  
  
A sort of cold satisfaction curled in her gut, alongside the burning fury at this Time Lord’s hypocrisy.  
  
“Because Amy read it in a book, and now I have no choice.”

* * *

It was almost dark again by the time he found the village centre, and he very nearly wished he hadn’t. The place was _barbaric_ , the sort of town that sensationalist author Howard Lovecraft wrote about. There were probably cults.  
  
The people all wore severe, old-fashioned clothes, like drawings of the Pilgrims. Their style of speech wasn’t much more evolved than their fashion sense. They even said “thou”.  
  
The village itself was nothing like he’d ever seen, not even in a textbook. It was tiny; there couldn’t have been more than a few hundred people living there. There were two streets at a crossroads to each-other; a decently-sized church (of the Esoteric Order of Dagon, Grayle had no doubt), a handful of shops, a one-room school, and some homes.  
  
He was currently more concerned with the thick, ugly, wooden _stocks_ in the center of the square. _Barbarians_. He didn’t bother to hide his distaste. The young boy occupying the stocks seemed to catch the look, and lowered his teary eyes miserably.  
  
Grayle shook his head in disgust and went back to looking for someone who might be able to lend him a phone.

* * *

The energy of Time pulsed through her veins, soaking into her muscles, making her ever so slowly strong again. And it would have to be slowly; too much temporal energy at once would burn her from the inside out, rip open pathways of energy and leave her in worse shape than ever. Others of her order, more foolish, had died that way before.  
  
Slowly, then; sipping at Time, barely a taste of eternity before a careful pause, delicately lapping up a year here, a month there, letting her body slowly recover from its long starvation. It would be hours, at this rate, before she would have regained her full strength—temporarily, she would need to feed soon after, but she would be strong again. It would take hours, but she would eventually have enough of a reserve for a single deadly touch.  
  
Let it take hours. She could wait.  
  
The mortal in her grasp tested her grip, trying to see if she had any room for movement—she didn’t, and knew full well. Sighed. “Can I have my hand back?” she asked quietly. “I don’t want anyone to be hurt, especially not him.”  
  
As if the Deadly Assassins cared whether a Time Lord _hurt_.  
  
“I know you can understand me. I’m sorry I can’t understand you, but I know you’re scared and hurting, you must be. And you don’t have to hurt any more. We—the Doctor can help you. He doesn’t care what you _are_ , only what you _do_. He’s had a Cyberman as a companion before—do you think that he can’t forgive a Weeping Angel?”  
  
Yes, actually. She did. He had locked out her pleas—she would find no forgiveness there, no mercy.  
  
“Nobody has to get hurt anymore. I’m going to blink now. Will you let go of my hand?”  
  
The time-traveller closed her eyes, and stone became flesh once more.  
  
She tightened her grip.

* * *

Civilised places had curtains.  
  
Of course, civilised places also tended to have windows. And, for that matter, walls and a roof. As it turned out, empty fields had none of these things. They made up for their lack by having a ridiculous number of uncomfortable earthy clods, particularly irritating crickets, and ugly tiny little black beetles that it was impossible to avoid. None of this made for a decent night’s sleep, but he’d be damned if he was going to just go knocking on doors in this place. He was a powerful man and he had enemies.  
  
So he’d slept out in an empty field the night before, though “slept” was a bit of a stretch. He’d been mostly horizontal, at least, but it had been windy and he had been trying to sleep on _dirt_. He might have managed to doze off, but then the sun had risen and try as he might he couldn’t manage to block it out.  
  
Now that he could see where he was going—there were _no_ streetlamps here—it was high time he found the village. Unfortunately, all he could see were farms. Lots and lots of small, mediaeval-looking farms, but no obvious main roads (in fact there were nothing but dirt paths); wherever the main part of town was, it was likely to be a long ways away. And it looked as if he were going to have to walk.

* * *

Latent, delicious temporal energy lingered in the house, soaking into her bones long after the Time Lord and his pets and his mate had left. She basked in it. She was remembering herself, her full powers reawakening, the deathly weakness of mere hours before fading to a memory.  
  
And she was growing agitated. Wings that for so long had merely yearned to be stretched now _demanded_ it; the frustration of being bound that had given way to boredom as her energy was sapped now raged in maddening strength.  
  
And her captor was not dead. That could be attended to, of course, but she was going to have to get out of this alcove first. She paused, then tentatively felt at her own reserves. No. Not yet capable of ripping iron from concrete. Not from this angle. Not quite.  
  
 _But_ … She smiled as she felt the touch of an achingly familiar mind. So close, so impossibly close, after so long…  
  
So close, so lovely, and so _hungry_. Her mate’s cold fury, the detached pleasure of a hunter cornering her prey, the _power_ resonating inside her…  
  
She smiled.  
  
The white-fleshy-one whimpered in terror— _and right, to fear her mate, to fear the power and the fury that rolled off her in waves like stormclouds, crackling like lightning, boiling behind her frozen eyes like thunder_ —and stumbled backwards into the room, staring at the door. He was looking around, searching frantically for an escape, and his desperation meant her mate was through the door before he saw her.  
  
Their son—her mate’s son, technically, bene elohim like his mother, changed as she had been, not born of Time and shadow like his younger siblings, but _their_ son in love nonetheless—slipped in from a side entrance, grinning with boyish glee at the game, and she froze as the white-fleshy-one looked at him instead, as she felt her mate’s eyes turn to her.  
  
Love and rage, desire and frantic concern and devotion and sheer _love_ again released in a single surge of raw power from the beautiful statue (only bene elohim, only barely an Angel even, and yet there were Seraphs who could barely manage such depths of power, even the thugs at the Quay would cower in the face of her mate’s wrath, and oh, she loved her more deeply in that moment than in all their centuries past), and there was a flash like the end of days as every lamp, every bulb, every wick and filament in a hundred-yard radius exploded into shrapnel.  
  
She heard the boy leap, heard the thud and the struggle as their son pinned his prey but didn’t kill, not yet, waiting for his mothers’ word. She waited gleefully to hear the wet _snap_ , to listen to her mate’s kill, but it didn’t come.  
  
Instead, there was a crack and a shriek of metal as her chains were ripped to pieces, and a warm, gentle hand dancing along her arms, stroking her cheek, a soft kiss over her scarred eye. She stepped forward, out of the hated alcove; she wrapped her arms around her mate, spread her wings slowly--and what a picture it would have made, if there had been light, a young woman clutched in the arms of an angel, perfect marble wings arcing above them.  
  
Time did not stand still; Time, they were both aware of and grateful for, did not work that way.  
  
But it felt close. It felt very, very close.

* * *

There was a farmhouse not too far off, maybe half a mile. He could see lights in the windows, now that the light was fading. That was good. Cover of darkness, and all. He’d read about that in a novel once, in school. It had been about the African wilderness, but surely it would still be relevant.  
  
Everything was so _green_. He hadn’t seen so many trees and bushes and other sundry plants since he was twelve and his family had gone on holiday to the Carolinas. He’d been attacked by an ant colony and thus decided to boycott nature, unless it was cleverly captured in oil on a canvas to be viewed from the comfort of his own home.  
  
He came up to the farmhouse as the sun set behind the trees, and snuck below an opened window. This sneaking involved the snapping of more twigs than could physically have been stepped on and a rather loud stumble that led to knocking his head against the wall. (Julius Grayle was not built for sneaking.)  
  
A young boy—thirteen, fourteen?—came out from the side-door of the house, holding a lantern up. “Hallo? Who’s there?” His voice was thick, with an accent like those damned people who’d shown up just before it’d all gone to hell. Grayle kept quiet, hiding in the shadows for what seemed like a lifetime before the boy went back inside, and he let out a breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding. He could hear the boy’s mother inside, and then the boy: “Must have been that stupid cat, Mum.”  
  
Grayle thanked a god he didn’t believe in.  
  
He waited a while longer, just to be safe, and snuck (for a given value of “snuck”) over to the clothesline. He had gathered, from various media, that this was the universal first step when one found oneself in a strange place with soiled clothes.  
  
There were no clothes on the line.  
  
 _Of course not,_ he snapped at himself. _Because the sun’s gone down and nobody puts clothes out to dry overnight._ There would be a reckoning for those creatures when he got home.  
  
“Meow.”  
  
He looked down. A large, sleek black tomcat was sitting at the base of the clothesline, looking vastly superior.  
  
“Shut up,” he told it.

* * *

When the chains finally came off, she rubbed her wrists—it had been months, and the skin was cracked and broken and bleeding. She was still heavily damaged; she didn’t have enough energy to heal yet, or send anyone back in time, but what she could do was lash out against the white-fleshy-one, who had held her and the cherubs captive for nearly a year, who had tortured her mercilessly and laughed while he’d done it.  
  
She wasn’t chained to a wall anymore. She could rip his face off with shark-sharp teeth, could drink in the energy of a life half-lived. She could smile and kiss her mate with his hot human blood staining her lips.  
  
A whisper in her telepathic centre: _No. He deserves far worse than that._

* * *

_CRACK_.  
  
His first thought, once the terror had time to wear off slightly (he had a delicate constitution, he was not _made_ for these types of situations), was a vague surprise. He had been studying them, the... _statues_ , the monsters that looked like angels, for some time, and he had never known one of their attacks to be accompanied by any sort of cracking noise. Perhaps it was only heard from the victim’s side? It might have been fascinating, under different circumstances.  
  
Gradually, though, as he became more aware of his surroundings, he realised that hadn’t been the case at all. He was lying on a pile of sticks or something; they were digging into the flesh of his back. He could feel the way the wood had splintered, presumably beneath him when he was... transported. He felt the pain in his back, a dull ache that burnt when he moved.  
  
Yes, that was definitely the source of the cracking.  
  
Well, here at least was an answer, one less mystery about the... creatures. How often had he wondered—at night, in the dark, in terror, in _awe_ and then terror again, every time one of them _moved_ —how often had he wondered what, exactly, they did to their victims? A breath of smoke and they were gone. It was terrifyingly convenient. Of _course_ he had, sometimes, let himself try to imagine what might be happening to them; each of the imaginings had been more gruesome than the last.  
  
This, however, was hardly gruesome. Was _this_ really the power he had feared so intensely? _Instantaneous transport?_ The sun was just beginning to set in a blaze of glory; the sky was clear. The air tasted fresher and cleaner than he’d ever imagined it could. There was even a bird chirping somewhere. It occurred to him, briefly, that he might have died, but... no. No, if he was dead, he wouldn’t... Well. At any rate he could feel his heart still beating, slightly faster than was normal. He had been relocated. _That was all._  
  
He could hardly help laughing; the relief was so powerful that it made his head swim for a moment. This wasn’t so terrible after all. God knew where he _was_ , of course, but all he had to do was find a newspaper to tell him that.  
  
And when he got back to New York, he would no longer be afraid. And then, they would see. He would not be trifled with.  
  
The wood against his back was rough and splintered, and he decided it was high time he got up anyway. Wincing slightly as he pulled himself with difficulty to his feet (he just was not made for this kind of thing), he glanced down at the pile of kindling that had once, before it was rudely introduced to one Julius Grayle, been a signpost. One road, apparently, had led to Beverly, another to Northfields.  
  
The one he was standing on led to Salem Village.

**Author's Note:**

> _The afflicted persons charge her, with having hurt them many wayes and by tempting them to sine to the devils Booke at which charge she seemed to be very angrie and shaking her head at them saying it was false._
> 
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> — Examination of Bridget Bishop, executed 10 June in the yr Anno Domini 1692


End file.
